Midsummer Night's Dream, III, i. If we can save your life again, by all means let us know.
J. O'D., 6/23/83
Q: Got an anagram for "ranted"? "Roast mules"?
R.S., 6/04/83
A: This one took time. Unfortunately, anagrams can't be solved by dipping into Reader's Guide. The first is triviaclass="underline" "ardent." The second took our concerted staff two weeks, although the answer is so simple any child can do it: "somersault," We hope you appreciate the tax dollars that went into these. If your efforts produce any cash prize, we trust you'll split it with your favorite library.
J. O'D., 6/23/83
Q: Where can I go live where the people are really well off, money-wise? I don't care what type of government, because I don't vote anyway.
K.G., 6/22/83
A: For sheer income there's always Nauru, a Pacific island whose eight thousand inhabitants are far wealthier per capita than the U.S. population. They make their money on one product, phosphates, which run the industries of Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The Nauruans extract the chemicals from huge deposit of seafowl guano laid down over thousands of years. Such affluence has a price. The island is itself largely a giant guano deposit, and the more than two million tons of phosphates exported each year eat it away rapidly. While everyone on Nauru drives expensive cars, there are fewer miles of road to drive on every year. You might as well stay home and vote.
J. O'D, 6/23/83
Q: Has a woman ever given birth to the child of a goat? What was this creature called?
B.R.G., 6/23/83
A: No. But such an offspring would be a satyr — Greek mythological hybrids, man above the waist, goat below.
J. O'D, 6/23/83
This last one attracted special attention. I've marked the card for admittance into my circumspect list of all-time classics. During my Question Board tenure, I've been asked everything at least once. Which is worse, cancer or heart attack? If Chicago time gives more hours than New York time, why don't we go on it too? I'm doing a family tree of Jesus and need to know Mary's last name; was it also Christ? Three weeks in the reference section of the local public would convince even Saint Paul that caritas is, if anything, beside the point. Love doesn't even scratch the surface of what the species needs. Goat-people arise more frequently than anyone except reference librarians knows. I long ago stopped being astonished at the number of people unable to distinguish between whim and brick wall, who choose their newspapers on whether they are readable on the subway.
As I left that evening, I thought how the italic-penned challenge also partook of the species-wide inability to tell need from not. All the way home, walking through the enfeebling city heat, I wondered why I'd agreed to help find what could better be learned by asking the man in question. I came up with no better answer than the asker's beauty. Reaching the relative safety of my neighborhood, I heard my father — no more tolerant than my mother in answering my endless girlhood questions — whisper his old litany, "Stranger, Danger," in my interrogative ear.
Face Value
I worked for a humiliating week and a half without turning up a shred of evidence that Stuart Ressler had ever existed, let alone done anything hard. I spent more time on the job than I should have, rigor proportionate to my anger at the thing's idiocy. Half a dozen times a day, on a new inspiration, I'd labor a page or phone midtown. I was on the verge of running a bogus credit check to get his date, place of birth, and social security. Ethics and pride prevented me, but only just. The sponsor called once during that period, more out of obligation than hope. He'd weaseled some specifics from the source that he thought might help. The man was born in 1932, putting him just over a half-century. He had been brought up in the East but joked about time as a young man "in the interior." He spoke little and read perpetually, everything from throwaway fiction to abstruse journals. He was by all appearances celibate. He lived at work. "You probably can't use this," my accomplice added, "but the only time I've ever seen him show emotion was last year, when that famous pianist stroked out dead."
I brought up the matter of occupations. "I know we're after the distant past here, but it might help to know what line of work the two of you are currently in."
Mr. Todd chuckled hollowly at the other end. "We run the country, the two of us. Nights. Paper collating. Buck ten over the minimum." They were the mainframe operations graveyard shift for a data-processing firm. "Info vendors. You and me are practically kissing cousins." He stopped short of suggesting we improve relations. As worthless as the stray facts were, I learned one helpful bit before disconnecting: Todd's name. He also gave me a number where I could reach him, "any hour of the night or night."
I hit the payoff only by coincidence, after another week of ingenious, impotent search. Serendipitous discovery, beloved of science historians. The trick to blundering onto a gold mine lies in long preparation. I undertook no project without testing it for relevance. But the solution chose to arrive with such accidental grace that it appalls me. A wide-eyed schoolboy had come to the Reference Desk with a whitewashed first draft of a term paper on civil rights. Attempting to bring the movement back from gelded interpretation, I led him to primary sources, contemporary reports of 1957 Little Rock — the Arkansas National Guard confronting the U.S. Army. We flipped through a popular Year in Pictures, the ingénu discovering that this foregone event had in fact required a second civil war just before his own birth, and was not yet decided.
As I'd done habitually with every book I touched for the last two weeks, I scanned the index. Nothing. Then the next year's cumulative, reduced to hunt-and-peck. This time, beyond all hope, an entry. Refusing to believe, I pulled the citation. A gallery of black-and-white portraits accompanying an article on this annus mirabilis in molecular genetics carried a minor caption that read, "Dr. Stuart Ressler: one of the new breed who will help uncover the formula for human life."
That was just the first shock. I had seen the accompanying face before. The eruption of coincidence made me put off calling Franklin Todd. I woke that night from a sleep of secret cabals to make the connection: Ike's coronary specialist, the man in the pilled oxford. He was a smooth twenty-six in the photo, and over fifty when I'd met him the previous fall. But despite the intervening years, his face was unmistakable. The cell paths responsible for aging had failed to erase his particulars. Lying in bed, unable to go back to sleep, I did the long division. The NYPL has over eighty branches serving more than ten million people. The odds against a man paying my insignificant branch a visit followed months later by another who wanted to identify him were incalculable. I jumped to conspiracy: the two were colluding to test my research skills for some reason I was compelled to figure out. In the dark of my room, beside a sleeping male whose breath did not change cadence as I shot awake, it felt as if Dewey had broken down: on the shelf, spine to spine beside the Biography Index where I had begun the search, came cheap intrigue.
Suspicion didn't leave me until the day Frank Todd took me to his office, that converted warehouse he shared with the still obscure Dr. Ressler. Only then did the statistical improbability work out. I laughed at my mathematical paranoia, at how I had missed the crucial, obvious splint: their office, the night watch where they nursed the machines, was four streets down from mine. I had swapped cause with effect. The two lost men were simply both patrons of the nearest public bookshelf.